SammyTheSnake

I'm at work and apparently I drove my car, which I now need to park somewhere and I'd rather like not to have to pay for parking, so I drive off south looking for somewhere I can park on the road. The road very rapidly starts feeling like an out of town road. I even consider parking in the entrance of a wheat field, but decide that I've driven too far from the office to walk back without being late for work, so I turn bank.

As I head back toward the office, I get lost and the roads don't look familiar, so I check on the satnav feature of my phone and realise where I went wrong. I'm on a road called the T3. I retrace my path again and end up coming through a whole bunch of narrow pedestrianised areas that eventually become inside. At some point, my car has become a motorbike.

At one point, my path seems to go over a very narrow footbridge - too narrow for me to go across without all the pedestrians getting out of my way. I consider going through the water underneath as it's very shallow, but am put off by a combination of the idea of driving a motorbike over what will probably be a very slippery surface, and the fact that the shallow water is teaming with tiny sharks!

I turn around and am briefly sidelined by some confusion about whether I'm supposed to be pedaling or not and when I pay attention to navigation again, I'm indoors in something like the mailbox in Birmingham (a mostly indoor collection of shops, restaurants, flats, hotels...) So I get off the bike and push it through. As I head down some stairs there's a scuffle going on between two blokes and one of them kicks out at me so I take his shoe off and throw it over the banister.

We argue a bit and I get bored of that and start looking for the way out. I end up in a cinema where the film is about to start but the adverts are still playing. I try to keep out of people's line of sight as I look for the exit.

I see that a section of wall looks like a screen but I realise somehow is actually a holographic protection covering an exit from the cinema. I step into it and as I do I realise it's just the entrance into the toilets but this is too cool not to investigate!

As I step through the screen, my view is replaced by a cartoon like facsimile of both myself and the scenery. I go down some stairs watching my cumbersome cartoonish feet on the steps and feeling how the view and the feeling are just fractionally out of synch because the cartoon view is drawn with slightly wobbly lines and not quite right angle corners. At the bottom of the stairs, I see a mirror in which I can see my cartoon self reflected. Apparently the system has decided to draw me like a rakishly thin Walter White, complete with the fedora like hat and sunglasses. I notice that I'm actually wearing a beanie hat and cardboard 3D glasses and am impressed that the system has identified what I'm wearing and created a cartoon replica that reflects that but not slavishly.

I notice in the mirror that there a chap behind me to the left who I think is part of the behind the scenes functioning of the illusion but somehow my 3D glasses let me see him vaguely. We chat a little bit about how cool the illusion is and he asks if I've looked at my hands yet, saying they usually have six fingers but they're still working on the rendering of that part. I look at my left hand and it looks like two images of a hand superimposed, both hands have long fingers, one with then curved to the left, one with then curved to the right. The overall impression is of far more fingers than I'm used to!

I switch to looking at my right hand. At first it looks fairly normal, though I notice I seem to have coloured felt tip pen markings. As I look a little harder, I realise that several of my fingers terminate with a further bifurcation into sub-fingers. I note that the sub fingers are made by duplicating my hand in miniature on the fingertips, though how complete the mini hand is varies from a couple of stubby blob like digits to a complete hand from the wrist up. I wiggle my fingers and delight in setting my teeny little subdigits doing their thing.

I decide to wash my hands and note that the pen markings come off very easily - perhaps they were illusory? The chap also washes his hands and while he goes off to the other side of the room to dry them I'm smugly satisfied that my magic glasses allow me to see there's a hand drier directly under the sink.

I head back up the stairs watching my goofy feet again, then turn a different way out of the cinema, ducking down to avoid blocking anyone's view again.

At this point, I have a micro awakening and managed to almost pull off a DEILD but wasn't quite lucid when I reentered the dream.

I'm in what looks like a dingy but dry basement or hidden storage area of an office building so I resume my mission to get to work on time having somehow sorted out the issue of parking. I realise that it's a long way up to the 25th floor where my office is but there's no lift in sight. I start on my way up a helix (*not* a spiral!) of platforms around the walls of the space. After about one storey of climbing, I come across some people working at desks spread out on the bare concrete floor. They give me disapproving looks as I climb over their desks and filling cabinets to get to to the next part of the building. As I climb off the top of a shelf full of boxes, I enter something much more like a house with large white gloss painted doors. Lots of corridors and small rooms give a general labyrinthine feel to the layout.

I come into a room that feels like a living area in somebody's home. There's a chap sitting at a table and a couple of figures I don't really look at but I take to be his children sitting around on the floor and sofas.

At this point, I GET LUCID! Though I have an of feeling that I more realised that I was already lucid (weird, huh?). I say to the guy at the table that if this is a dream then I should try to do my tasks, right? He looks a little confused but plays along. I remember that one of the TOTMs is to put shoes on and tie the laces. I ask the chap if I can borrow some shoes to do the task and he reaches around to get a shoebox from behind the table. Inside are an assortment of odd shoes from which I manage to pick out a pair of red baseball pumps. I fish out a black gym dap from inside the left shoe and put it on. I notice that the laces aren't looped into the eyes of the shoe properly and I don't fancy my chances of sorting that out in dreamland without cheating, but they are in place enough that I can try to tie a bow. I tie a bow in the left shoe laces with surprising ease and as I finish it off I realise that the laces are now correctly threaded through the eyes. Handy. I repeat the process (complete with removing another shoe from inside the one I'm trying to put on) and while I'm doing it, ask of the guy has any fortune cookies. He looks surprised again as if it's a huge coincidence that I want fortune cookies when he happens to have a bowl of them on the table! I explain that this is my deam so if I want fortune cookies, I get fortune cookies. He seems to be mostly satisfied with that but still looks a little unsure.

I shove a cookie in my mouth, it tastes and feels like a stale prawn cracker. I try to pull the paper slip out of the cookie while I bite it and after a few false starts manage to get a bit of paper but it doesn't have anything intelligible written on it. I take another cookie and more carefully bite it open to get to the fortune. This time the fortune is a tea stain coloured mah jiang tile with a Chinese symbol I don't recognise on it. Frustrated at my second attempt being thwarted by a lack of language skills, I decide that I *do* know Chinese and have another look at the symbol. I realise that it means "Fortune" and figure that's good enough! :-)

Next up, I want to try the toilet portal. I go through a couple of doors and find a large white porcelain appliance of a style in fitting with the late Victorian feel of the house. I pull the chain and jump into the bowl. Unfortunately, all that achieves is soggy feet. I try going in head first in a dive but chicken out because the porcelain feels intimidatingly solid!

I give up on the toilet bowl (I should have thought to shrink myself but hey) and scan around for something else to do. I remember that Sensei's competition back in July had a task to transform a DC and decide to give that a go. I go back to the room with the table guy and children and look at a skinny girl who looks about twelve. I tell her to raise her arms sideways and grow some more arms. That seems to work quite well, she now has six arms, though the four extra ones coming out of her armpits are a little small and underformed. Inspired by the slightly odd appearance of the new arms, I decide to see if I can make one of them form into something more impressive.

I will the fingers of one of the new arms to grow downward, which they obligingly do. The thumb of the hand also extends and becomes a head while the descending fingers become a body and legs. Eventually there are two girls looking like conjoined twins who share an arm. Shame I didn't manage that during the competition, eh?

I attempt a WBTB WILD. I'm pretty sure there was a gap in consciousness, but as the dream scene forms around me, I know it's a dream.

In front of me is a box/cage formed from metal bands. I decide to phase my way into the cage and back out again. The bands of metal bend with me a bit before flopping back into place like rubber bands. I remember that one of the tasks in the dream competition was to phase through something solid with eyes open so I look around for a suitable target.

I'm in an abandoned building, bits of it feel like a multistory car park, but some bits feel like they used to be an office building. I see a wooden door and go to phase through it, I almost forget to keep my eyes open, but remember as I get to the door. The inside of the wood is a interesting combination of woody and transparent, the dark bands of the grain still visible and the light bands feel like air. As I come through the far side of the door, some of the grain bands stick to me for a bit before falling back into place like a bead curtain.

My recall is a bit vague about the next transition of scene, as I didn't bother to write anything down until the morning (bad boy!)

I'm at some kind of conference centre eager to get out and do some lucid dream tasks. I'm in an area outside the main auditorium room with hordes of people on their way in. I spot Jo McCaffery who's exited because she's going to be doing a presentation as part of the session and wants me to be there for moral support and feedback. I'm torn because I really want to do that for her but I also don't want to miss out on my lucid dream time. I'm just starting to follow the flow of delegates when I realise it's not actually her, but a DC, so it really doesn't matter! Lucid dreaming tasks it is!

I walk along a road for a bit, chatting with a couple of DCs. I see a door and the word "door" triggers my TOTM mnemonic, based as usual on the Tony Buzan rhyming numbers thing.

1 - bun. A bun opens just like a fortune cookie.
2 - shoe. Put some shoes on and don't forget to tie them
3 - tree. Laying a log in the toilet.
4 - door. I bet my Patronum is just behind that door!

I think the door is the back door of a childhood home, inside the conservatory.

I open the door and there on the quarry tiled floor, snuggled into a nest of blanket, are two crochet stuffed toy bunnies with pig-like snouts (they actually look somewhat like the clangers, but they were definitely bunnies) they look sleepy but seem to like a bit of petting. They're soft and warm and really cute!

I share my excitement with the random DCs, but it's too much excitement and I wake up with a "squee!"

With a bunch of Jubilee people heading to a meeting slash conference in an old fashioned church building. I'm torn between sitting with somebody I sort of fancy and playing it cool (can't remember who it was that I was crushing on) I end up sitting on the row in front of her. There's some conversion about the way the conference is organised this time around, with cars parking on site rather than in separate car parks.

I'm outside of the meeting wandering to another building which contains some kind of dormitory. There's a couple of loaves of rustic looking bread on the wall beside a pond, which doesn't seem to have any purpose or meaning (but appear again later on) and down some steps there are other conference delegates and we just hang out a bit.

Everyone else seems to be heading off to the next meeting but for some reason it's a meeting I'm not going to. I laze around a bit and have a snooze. I wake up feeling a bit miffed that I haven't got a dream to journal. It's rained a little while I was resting, the bread looks tempting but is all soggy from the rain and I'm disappointed because I kinda fancied some.

FA - I wake up back at the meeting, I've been sleeping with my head on my crossed arms resting on a little desk for making notes. I think about the dream I just had and think about journaling it, then I realise where I am is a dream location and GET LUCID!

I glance at the people sitting next to me and realise that they're just a dream and I don't have to sit through a meeting I'm not in the mood for. I say "fuck this" and get out of my chair a little clumsily, nearly tripping over the other nearby chairs. I hover forward feeling very excited at being lucid again after a dry patch.

I spot Jofish sitting at a backward facing take at the front of the room. I say "hey Jo, I'm lucid!" He doesn't look all that impressed, so I hover a foot or so of the ground and say "Look! This is a dream!" He still doesn't seem to care and I remember that he's also just a DC and it really doesn't matter what he thinks. I float to the back of the room and people are starting to leave. I look at all their faces, noting that I don't recognise most of them. They are a variety of ages, including some older folk, which is a little surprising because Jubilee is sadly short on that front. I spot a nice looking young lady and start imagining how to get in her pants. The bunch of us start heading back to the campsite and I realise chasing tail isn't the highest calling in a lucid dream, so I start practicing flying along the path. I struggle to get any altitude by jumping (up to about 5 metres but coming back to a few feet above the ground) I try floating because when you jump, you come down, but floating doesn't come with that expectation. Still only a few feet up. I try doing a Superman pose and flying fast but can only go at a rather boring swift walk pace (at which speed, the Superman pose feels a little silly)

I remember the TOTM Basic Task of getting naked, so I turn back to the bunch of people I was walking with, I'm just a bit ahead of them from my flying practice. I rip off my shirt and they all notice that something odd is going on. Because they're *my* DCs, they know why I'm doing this and they're all a little expectant. I aim to pull my trousers down leaving my boxers to last but my boxers come down with my trousers. Immediately, the several young ladies in the group start throwing themselves at me, jostling for the privilege of being unusually nice to me. Then I wake up feeling a little bit miffed that my libido managed to hijack my dream even though I'd decided to do something different but still feeling a little pleased that I was so suddenly popular, even if only with my subconscious!

Apparently, starring a dream feeling horny can set certain expectations...

My recall is a bit patchy and my level of lucidity wasn't very high and kept coming and going, but I managed a basic task nonetheless :-)

I got lucid from a DEILD using an odd dance manoeuvre as my anchor (hopping into the air and touching my left knee against my right elbow, alternating with the opposite way around) I came into my LD on a sunny street with lots of old buildings (a hodgepodge of Tudor, late Victorian redbrick, and other stuff - I wasn't looking, really)

I still felt a little unstable in my dream because I had a residual sensation of my sleeping body's arms, so I decided to look at my feet and legs and work up to my arms. I was wearing the same clothes as I had been wearing that day in waking life.

Once I saw my dream body's hands, I knew I wasn't in immediate danger of waking up again, so I started leaping into the air to get a better view of the scene and find an interesting DC to interact with. I saw a few faces with greater clarity than I usually get (most of my DCs have very vague faces indeed and seeing clearer faces is one of my personal dream goals)

I got a little distracted by a couple of DCs who probably ought to have taken a pregnancy test and might have got me one of the advanced tasks! This is a sure sign of fading lucidity for me, but after a while I realised I was still lucid and tried to remember the tasks. The only one I could remember was the kiss-a-guy task, which I probably remembered just because I didn't like the idea of it at all! As I was still on the street with the old buildings, I started looking for male DCs to smooch and ended up in a warehouse / workshop with some big burly men working on manly metalwork type things in hard hats and such. I approached the nearest one, probably about my age with designer stubble, and went to kiss him. He cooperated because in my dream he was only there for the task, so it made no sense for him to so otherwise. I gave him a quick peck on the lips and moved on.

Anyway, as I said, I only managed one basic task, and I've missed out what felt like about 20 minutes of not-really-lucid that I don't remember very clearly (including a big section with my little girl sleeping in a small tent in my bedroom - dreamsign?) So if there's a one wing option, I'd be happy to take that and see if I can improve on this attempt some time over the next couple of weeks

I started with an amusing dream about a time trial downhill skiing / cross country rollerblading competition which started off quite believable but slowly changed into a mad dash down stairs and escalators in a strange shopping centre slash airport type location. After a while of whizzing through this odd location I reached a sort of semi lucidity in which I has a sense of the unreality and flexibility of the situation but wasn't lucid enough to call it a dream. There were bunches of dream signs but I didn't recognise them as such at the time:

* old place of work/workmates
* feeling of familiarity without knowing where from
* feeling in an unspecified rush
* repeating sections of activity (going down the same slope multiple times)
* more that I can't remember off the top of my head

I had a very brief awakening, during which I realised that the preceding was a dream and I now had a chance of a DEILD. I think I actually had some non-lucid dream to start with, but I have no memory of the content. When I gained lucidity I was in a sunny location with stone terraces and balconies. I remembered the TOTM and immediately spotted a large block of sandstone which I decided to try to levitate by The Force. I doubted myself for a moment because I knew it would be heavy and I didn't want to jump in at the deep end too much. Fearing I might just get frustrated by negative expectations, I briefly considered finding something smaller to levitate, but then realised that I could just make the rock lighter, which worked beautifully!

After that I thought I'd move on to to the cinco de mayo task. I was about to go off in search of a bar but realised that there was one conveniently just behind me! I sat at the bar and asked the barman to share some slammers with me. I've only had tequila slammers once before (not much of a fan of tequila, really) so I got a bit confused about the process and ended up chugging a whole glass full of lime segments rather than just biting one, but I reckon that was close enough!

I lost lucidity a little after that and drifted into a strange dream about being late for work, then woke up to realise I *was*!